Randy Hart’s 2012 in Playback

The cool thing about a new year is, you never know what’s going to happen over that 12 month period beginning January 1st until you look back around the following December 31st to evaluate. Only in retrospect can we accurately see the significance and insignificance of projects and happenings, some we anticipated and many we did not.

In 2012, if music had a passport Aircast would have some new stamps from foreign lands. With projects taking us (both figuratively and literally) to South America, Mexico and China, we realized that our musical footprint is covering much more ground than a year ago. While that in itself isn’t earth shattering, those opportunities bring with them a simple yet profound satisfaction that we can communicate with virtually anyone anywhere utilizing the universal language of music. If cool had a scale by which it was measured, this would be off it, too big to calculate.

Now let’s not forget about projects within our own borders. We had the luxury of working in both radio and television, musically marketing everything from a new brand of tortillas to Professional Bull Riding on a major network. Many television stations called on Aircast to create musical identities from news music/station branding packages to more focused marketing messages supporting their programming.

Looking forward to 2013, while I’m eager to look back this time next year and see what happened, the various journeys that take me to destinations are the best and most memorable parts of the whole experience. Along with the great satisfaction in hitting the send button to a client for final delivery of his or her music project we created, my interaction with that client, the composers, musicians, singers and engineers who helped bring that project to life is the real gold.

I recently did a recording session with a good friend for an upcoming release of his. It was an all day affair, beginning with a song that was only my piano and his vocal. Then the rest of the rhythm section arrived and we proceeded to record about 5 songs throughout the day, which is a pretty good clip for a master recording. Their musicianship was stellar and inspiring. When I left that studio I was beat, but there was also a feeling of exhilaration unique (for me) to that process. Recording is unlike any other thing I do. Time slows waaaaay dooowwwwwwn as I see music through the microscope of a microphone that captures every little nuance of what it hears. The perfect end result is a representation of the song that sounds spontaneously performed and respectful of its musical message. As we listen to the playback, the collective judgment on a track’s quality is based not just on how it sounds but also how it feels.

Now that we’re reaching official “end of year” status and looking both backward in reflection and forward in anticipation, my wish is for everyone to have something in their lives that offers that profound feeling of achievement, enjoyment and exhilaration as the musical process gives me. Whatever comparable event one may have to not only listening to the playback, but also being a part of the song’s creation can be magically fulfilling (not to diminish the listening experience by itself!). And I hope 2013 has plenty of “playbacks” for us all.